The Disestablishment of Paradise

by Phillip Mann

  . . . for home.

  An hour or so later the sturdy SAS barked into life. The two rotors began to carve the air and moments later the flyer lifted. Hera was at the controls and she set a direct course for her Monkey Terrace home.

  She followed the rift valley and watched as little by little the

  Mother Nylo became bigger as more tributaries entered it. At the place where the Mother Nylo was joined by the Lazyboy stream, she turned west, and then she handed over the controls to Alan.

  Night had by now fallen. Hera fell asleep in her chair.

  Twelve hours later, when she awoke, the SAS was cruising over the Chimney Mountains. By mid-afternoon she had reached Big Fella Lake and could see her small shilo at the end of the water. How peaceful it looked. How welcoming!

  Some washing she had left out to dry when she went to bid farewell to the last shuttle was still flapping on the line. The large and straggly monkey tree was white with blossom and small weeds were sprouting up in the clearing. How differently she felt about the weeds since seeing the umbrella tree plantation.

  An hour after landing Hera was swimming in Big Fella Lake. She had had enough of travel for the time being. There was a lot she needed to think over and a lot to absorb. As she lay back and floated, her hair loose in the water and arms spread wide, she could, if she relaxed, just hear, or see, or feel, that shimmering music, that golden light, that warmth that was now part of her.

  And always it was also there, woven through the experience – that fine thread of pain.

  12

  Tattersall Errant

  Hera did not sleep well after returning to her shilo. And when she did sleep, her dreams were vivid and scary. She also found herself waking at strange hours. A great restlessness led her to wander about at all hours. ‘All symptoms,’ she said, ‘of turbulence in the psychosphere of Paradise.’ She did not feel that she was again being called or contacted as such; it was just that she was now aware of movements, sometimes quite violent, such as sudden squalls in the lake or strange lights in the sky.

  Then one night . . . Shortly after midnight she started awake, every sense alert. She had heard something move outside. The popping of seed pods did not occur at night and the only sounds that normally disturbed the night were the creaking of the nearby trees or the slap of waves on the shore. The sound she had heard was not like these. It was a scraping sound. And then, unmistakably, she felt as well as heard something bump against the wall of the shilo.

  Pulse rising, Hera slipped out of bed and crept over to one of the windows. The two moons, riding almost together, were high above the clearing, and their light cast the shadow of the window frame starkly onto the plastic blinds. Not wanting to make a sound, Hera eased the blinds open and looked out into the clearing. No breeze was disturbing the tops of the monkey trees. She scrutinized the table, the greenhouse, the sheds, the hangar, holding her gaze on each until she was sure there was no movement. Then her eye fell on a that had grown beside one of the sheds . . . . There was something happening there. As Hera watched, the plant trembled. The movement started small but gradually increased until the entire shrub was shaking. It will shake itself to death, she thought. And then the shaking ceased and the entire plant fell forward onto the ground, its branches spread in an untidy tangle. She could see where the shallow ball of its roots had detached from the ground.

  Again Hera was reminded what strange plants the s were – beautiful, sweet but with a presence that made her uncomfortable. Always she was aware of that tainted reputation. And now this one had shaken itself to death. Why?

  She heard again the scraping sound that had wakened her. Then there came a distinct but muffled thump against the opposite side of the shilo, the side closest to the forest. It was as though the wall had been hit with a mop. Quietly she crept across the room. Above her was a sloping skylight through which the moons were shining. As she watched, a shadow moved across the window. There was no mistaking its shape – it was a flower, fully open. Hera ran to the kitchen where she kept a ladder. She set it up just under the skylight, which had been left propped slightly open due to the nights being warm. Hera climbed up stealthily and peered out through the narrow opening. As she did so, a limb of the came over the roof like a thrown rope and the thorns scratched on the hard surface of the window. Hera almost fell off the ladder, but she steadied herself, slammed the window shut and slid the bolt. Lying across the window was the branch. She saw it begin to contract, and the long thorns struggle for purchase, but there was nothing now for them to hold on to. The branch slipped back and fell heavily outside and with it went the flower.

  Shaken, but more surprised than frightened, Hera climbed down. She crossed to the front door and made sure that it was secure and then hurried to all the other windows and the small back door, making sure they were closed and locked. Shilos were strong, built for frontier conditions on strange worlds, and she had no fear that a weed could rupture the walls or bring the roof down. Nor did she feel under attack. As she explained to me, ‘Strange as it may seem, I rather accepted what was happening as just another manifestation of how quickly things were changing on Paradise. I thought of myself as a kind of beacon, a candle flame attracting strange things – experiences. Mark you, I was careful and on my guard. I was not afraid of being attacked, but more that an accident might happen. The s were very clumsy!’

  Satisfied that all was now secure, Hera returned to the ground-floor window. The that had trembled and fallen was moving again. It had contracted and the roots had pulled well clear of their hole. Then part of it convulsed and one of the upper branches was thrown forward, towards the shilo. Other branches uncoiled and, when they had reached their maximum extent, twisted. The long thorns pressed into the brevet. Now began another slow contraction. Some of the thorns tore from the soil, but many held and slowly (‘painfully slowly’ said Hera) the root ball of the weed was dragged forward.

  It was one of the most grotesque things I had ever seen. At ORBE we knew that weeds sometimes behaved a bit like vines. That is in the nature of many invasive plants, and we knew that the thorns could give support when they got lodged in the foliage of some local tree, but we had never imagined that the thorns could be used as crampons or that the mechanism which allowed the seeds to be shed could be adapted to allow the plant to travel overland. I am still convinced that this was a new development, simply because the weed I was observing was so inept at crawling. Even when the roots were able to add their little scamper, the energy expended for the advantage gained was ridiculous. Evolution is more efficient! But the had tenacity, a simple kind of dedication and there was something comic about it, though I do not remember laughing.

  Hera watched the crawl slowly towards her shilo. Sometimes it moved more sideways than forward, but there was always a net gain. Behind it, the left a path of torn earth. Then came the moment when it arrived directly outside her window. Hera had by now opened the blinds so that she could see clearly. She witnessed the way it compressed and then pushed its branches up against the wall of the shilo until it was leaning there like a drunk who, having lost his balance, does not know why he does not fall over. She saw the gather two of its branches for one final fling. The branches coiled, tightened and then released. The tops of the branches snaked up and some of the hooked barbs caught on the gutter above the window. She saw the contract and pull itself bodily upright. It was now standing against the wall. One of the blue flowers, its petals ragged, was pressed against the window.

  The last action she observed was in the roots. The tree remained in the same spot but shook as its roots worked at the soil, digging themselves in like worms. This took a long time. Hera concluded that the had simply run out of energy. However, it had saved its most unusual manoeuvre for last. There came a moment when all motion ceased, and then it suddenly bedded down.

  It looked for all the world as though the roots and trunk had been tugged firmly from underground and then tied off. Immediately the whole tree stiffened up
and became still. Then slowly it wilted. All the branches except those that were holding it drooped down and rested on the ground. Its flowers closed and fell, scattering their petals. I think it fell asleep!

  The sky was beginning to turn grey. The crawl from the shed to the shilo had taken just over three hours.

  Hera’s next actions were very characteristic. Many of us would have decided to escape the house, but she got out her drawing book and made sketches of the way she had seen the move. Then she made herself breakfast, and when that was finished and the sun was streaming in through the window and casting the shadow of the across the room, she climbed the ladder again, opened the skylight and climbed out onto the roof.

  Three s had reached the house in the night and now lay draped across it. Others at the edge of the clearing had also moved. Two had managed to climb into one another and now lay in a tangled heap. Another had approached the monkey trees and, attempting to climb one, had become stranded, its roots dangling above the ground. That one was already dead. The leaves and flowers had fallen and its moisture was dripping from the ends of its flaccid branches.

  Hera climbed back inside the shilo and locked the window behind her. She left the house by the back door and went round to the front, keeping well clear of the newly arrived s. She was uncertain what to do. Her first thoughts were to get a scorch gun and trim the weeds back or dig them out. That certainly is what she would have done a few months earlier, but she was now not the same Hera. Of one thing she felt certain: the shilo had not been attacked. Plants tend to gravitate either by seed development or by root movement to those environments that are most congenial. So, the s – in their own ungainly fashion – were finding the outside of the shilo convivial. Well, she should feel honoured. She would not be casual around them, but nor would she walk in fear. Nor did she see any reason to change a plan she had made to visit the Island of Thom. And if the s had gathered round her front door when she got back, well, she would deal with that when the time came.

  If in reasoning this way Hera appears to be somewhat foolhardy or naive, that is merely a measure of how far she had moved from the cautious attitudes of Earth and how much faith she placed in those few moments she had spent in communication with Paradise. She felt protected.

  Hera touched the control panel strapped to her wrist. ‘Alan. Prepare for take-off. Destination Island of Thom. Duration of time away five days. Departure time asap. Out.’

  No sooner had she spoken when she heard the hangar doors begin to crank open. Moments later the compact form of the SAS emerged – fully charged, spruced and ready for action.

  13

  At the Heart of the Labyrinth

  The land Hera was flying over had never been se led.

  Rugged, wild and prone to earthquakes, it could not be farmed and even the early MINADEC prospectors had found little to interest them. It was a land of steep windswept hills and dark plunging valleys. At the bottom of these, dark lochs, shrouded in mist, showed hardly a ripple or even a reflection of the daylight.

  The SAS crossed a ravine. A spring gushed from between two rocks and filled a small circular lake. This emptied over a worn stone ledge, from which the water fell sheer, disappearing into the misty depths. However, it was what Hera saw beyond this which astonished her. She sat up suddenly and shouted, ‘Stop, Alan. Stop.

  Hold steady.’

  The SAS banked in the air and the rotor blades changed pitch as the craft hovered. Below, where the ravine widened, Hera saw blue-flowered weeds. Nothing really surprising about that, except that the plant had been absent for most of the journey so far. But now, suddenly, here they were in their thousands, and instead of being randomly spaced and growing wherever the seed fell, these had sprung up following a very precise pattern: a spiral.

  The lines of the spiral were not perfect – they followed the contours of the land – but the basic shape was unmistakable, it was like a frozen blue whirlpool, with the centre hidden under what was, in effect, a bouquet.

  This could not be ignored. Quickly Hera checked the ORBE reference records stored in the memory bank of the SAS, hoping to discover whether there had ever been any project work done here.

  There had not. Out-plantings had been undertaken at the coast and in some of the valleys close to the shore, but little work had been done elsewhere. This land had been left alone. A footnote indicated that in the early days Mayday Newton had led a small expedition through here hunting for different varieties of the Paradise plum. It had been unsuccessful. And that was all.

  Certainly, if anything like these rings had ever shown up on the satellite images which formerly tracked changes on the surface of the planet, ORBE workers would have come running. But the satellites had been among the first things closed down when the Disestablishment began. So, this formation was a relatively recent phenomenon, and one that would not have been observed had Hera not chanced to pass by. Hera wondered if the presence of the weeds meant that a rescue operation was in progress. If so, for what?

  Hera guided the SAS down slowly and held steady as soon as she detected the slightest turbulence from the rotor blades among the flowers. She adjusted the magnification on the tri-vid screen to maximum. Immediately, the image of the flowers filled the screen and their blueness brightened the cabin. But Hera could not see through them. At maximum resolution she could see the individual thorns and stalks of the Tattersall weed. They came into and out of focus as they moved in the breeze. But nothing definite could be seen below them. Hera tried other filters – ultraviolet, infrared, sonic imaging – and they all told the same story. Certainly there was something at the centre. It was small, dark and warm; but that was all she could tell.

  If Hera wanted to know more, she would have to go down and see for herself.

  ‘Find a landing place, Alan. As close as you can to an entry point into that labyrinth.’

  The SAS cruised slowly over the spiral. The weeds grew closely together with no obvious breaks. In speaking to Alan, Hera had used the word labyrinth in a casual way. She had not realized how accurate her description was. And, had she known, would she have behaved differently? Probably not. But she would have been more careful.

  The best landing place Alan could find was a small rock-strewn plateau where the side of the ravine was less steep. It was just above the rows of weeds. The small stream, after its hectic journey from the pool above, meandered nearby, and provided a natural opening through the plants.

  Thoughtfully, Hera donned meshlite overalls and a helmet and visor. After witnessing the antics of the weeds at the shilo, she did not know what to expect and so added a small scorch gun to her equipment. Then she climbed out of the SAS and slid down the bank to the stream.

  Crossing the stream was easy and Hera soon found herself standing in a narrow avenue with tightly packed weeds towering on either side. She reasoned that if she followed this natural path round for several circuits she would eventually reach the centre. She set off at an easy jog, heading down the slope. She splashed across the stream again at the lowest point, and then climbed up the hill on the other side. From the top she could see the SAS perched on the hillside.

  With each circuit the path got smaller. Soon the giant weeds were packed so closely together that they seemed like a wall. The way became darker too, and it seemed as though she had entered a tunnel, for the plants now met overhead in a tangle and she could no longer see the sky. The air was still and heavy with the perfume of the s. She jogged on while the path steadily narrowed until it finally stopped at a wall of weeds. The centre would be just beyond this.

  Dropping to her knees, Hera was able to crawl under the lower branches. Emerging from under these, she found herself facing another wall of branches. But here there was nothing random. She was facing what, if she had been on Earth, would have been called a formal hedge. The tall weeds were bent and tightly intertwined as though they had been plaited to make a basket. There were no gaps.

  Hera comments:

  I knew tha
t whatever was being guarded by s was on the other side, but there was no way through. I moved on round what was now quite a small circle. I was very aware of the noise that I was making. But I tried to be quiet, the way one does in a church or a museum. I remembered the time when I was a student and someone had an epileptic it in the library. The noise of the chair being knocked over and the harsh gasping could be heard in all the rooms. Terrible. Then there was the time when my mother and I were on our travels and in a big gloomy building in Italy, and someone dropped a bottle of wine on some marble steps and it shattered and the echoes seemed to go on for hours. These memories came to me with great force.

  Surely there must be a way through. And there was.

  She came to a giant weed, one with a trunk wider than her outstretched arms and branches that supported masses of flowers which tumbled right to the ground. A guardian tree if ever she had seen one. So densely packed were its flowers, they were like a wreath. But the lowest branch formed an arch about two feet above the ground, and so, down on hands and knees, like a humble pilgrim, Hera was able to crawl through to the other side, and so to the centre.

  I found myself in a vast cistern. The walls formed by the weeds rose sheer and unbroken, towering up until they grew inwards like an ancient beehive tomb. And the roof was a canopy of blue flowers speckled with sunlight.